Census Stages a Recount in North San Diego County

Census takers went into the fields of North San Diego County at dawn Friday to recount migrant workers, but the effort drew criticism from advocates for the homeless, who said they were suspicious of the results because the Census Bureau provided no advance notice.

Despite the skepticism, census officials proclaimed that they now had a “quality count” of the migrants.

“We feel comfortable not only with our procedure, but with the execution of those procedures,” said Dan Conway, a Census Bureau spokesman. “We’re better organized this morning than we were 48 hours ago, and we now have a complete count of the migrant workers in North County.”

But Mike Weiler, assistant regional census manager based in Van Nuys, said workers only revisited half of the migrant camps that need recounting, and they intend to count the others sometime next week.

“We felt we did have sufficient staff to at least start the process,” Weiler said. “What we had done was a portion of the recount today, and we will do another portion next week.”

The conflicting comments from census officials and the apparent secrecy with which the recount was conducted have some homeless advocates saying the Census Bureau dealt in bad faith. The bureau, which acknowledged it had botched the migrant count earlier in the week, had said it would make procedural changes, use more bilingual census takers and retrain the “enumerators” before embarking on the recount.

“I am suspicious,” said Connie Saldana of Hispanic Services of the North County Interfaith Council who helped identify camp sites of homeless migrants. “It’s curious that they did it so fast, and I would rather have seen them take a different method of counting.”

Neither Saldana nor any other homeless service provider was notified of the recount before it was conducted, nor were any media agencies, said Conway. Previously, census officials had said a recount probably would not take place until next week.

“I definitely feel that they were being sneaky about it,” Saldana said. “To me it’s very clear that they were trying to do it without any observers. I know if I had known about it, I would have gone again to observe.”

“I think part of it is that the Census Bureau was thinking, ‘If there is any criticism, why have someone around to watch us count’ ?” said Irma Castro of the Chicano Federation. “I don’t think that anyone really feels that they did it right.”

When the original count of homeless people was conducted Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the Census Bureau involved most homeless advocates in the area and alerted all the news outlets. Even before the count began, homeless advocates had decried the methodology being used as inadequate. But census officials said the recount showed that they recognized their shortcomings and were willing to improve.

“We are the ultimate evaluators. We know what we did and did not do,” Conway said. “I think there’s a certain level of credibility gained because we recognized that our original efforts did not meet our own standards.”

Conway said a recount had to be done quickly because the homeless population moves quickly and the bureau wanted an accurate demographic picture of the region.

“We were trying to move swiftly and we were focused on the operational component of the project, not the promotional component,” Conway said.

However, Census Bureau officials said shortly after the original count that, in order for a recount to take place, they would “have to go back and do some reworking” of the operational plan and the number of sites visited, and retraining of enumerators and supervisory roles.

“We need everything in place before we do this,” said Weiler, the regional census official, on Wednesday. He added that a recount was not likely until next week.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, 250 enumerators from the Census Bureau’s Carlsbad office took part in the nationwide operation to count the homeless. After the count was completed, Weiler reported that he had “a little bit of a concern in terms of the North County area,” specifically that many of the migrant homeless were not interviewed and only head counts were taken.

“I don’t think that we feel we missed anything (in North County). It’s that the enumerations should have been face-to-face,” Weiler had said Wednesday. “One of the things we want to get is not just the head count but accurate characteristics as well.”

But migrant workers in the McGonigle Canyon area near Rancho Penasquitos said they were not interviewed by census workers on Wednesday morning and that no census workers were seen Friday at this, one of the largest migrant campsites in North County.

“All they did was count people. They didn’t ask the questions that they were supposed to ask,” said Marco Antonio Guevara, who, like others interviewed at the camp, had experienced several censuses in Mexico.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s all theater. They want to do what is necessary for their bureaucracy, but they don’t really want to count us,” he said.

Of 30 people interviewed in the canyon off Black Mountain Road, none of them had been interviewed in-depth by census takers on the original count, and none had seen any enumerators on Friday.

Several people said census takers had trouble communicating with them during Wednesday’s count, and, as far as they could tell, enumerators just took head counts. One migrant worker noted that people were leaving for work when the census takers arrived, making it difficult to get an accurate count.

“It was an eleventh-hour final decision to do the recount, and we couldn’t say we were going to do it until we knew we were going to do it,” Conway said Friday.

The recount was conducted between 4:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. Friday by 70 enumerators and nine supervisors. The count was preceded by a three-hour training session that began at 1:30 a.m. in the hope that mistakes made previously would not be repeated.

The North County migrant homeless population was the only population that required a recount from the original count of the homeless, according to a Census Bureau spokeswoman.

The decision on when to do the recount was based on the availability of bilingual enumerators to effectively do a count, Conway said, since there were very few Spanish-speaking census takers covering North County during the original operation. Bilingual enumerators who worked in other parts of the county were recruited to help in the North County recount.

“Every team that was sent out this morning (Friday) had at least one bilingual speaker, sometimes more,” Conway said.

The decision was made to go on with the count at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Of the 1:30 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. training session, Conway said, “We trained them on the importance of interviews, how to do interviews, and the techniques involved, and not just to do head counts.”

“We had improved training, and a select number of enumerators from the previous night. We used the ones that understood the process the best, and we had more supervisors for the recount,” Conway said.

Enumerators outnumbered supervisors in the original count by 20 to 1, while the ratio in the recount was 8 to 1.

The recount focused only on those areas of North County that had specific problems with enumerators not conducting interviews of the homeless, he said.